


Anywhere but here

by SharpestRose



Category: American Beauty (1999), Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-01
Updated: 2011-07-01
Packaged: 2017-10-20 21:51:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/217444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SharpestRose/pseuds/SharpestRose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Faith and her cellmate play a game.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Anywhere but here

"Make believe for hours and hours  
you and me, lovers like fireworks  
It's the only light I can see for miles"  
Love Song, Furslide

  


Her eyes itched.

That was because she hadn't washed her hair in a week and a half, and the oil clogging the brown strings was irritating her skin. It was revolting, but she didn't intend to do anything about it any time in the near future. She didn't even move to pull it off her face where it tickled and scratched against her cheek and neck. Just lay there, smoking and looking up at the ceiling, so close to her face up here, on the top bunk, one of her legs dangling off the edge and kicking idly at the air.

"Wicked. I get a celebrity for a roomie." a voice said. She didn't look up. The guard showed her new bunkmate where everything was and then the door was slid closed and it was just the two of them.

"Hello? There a brain in there or you just look up at the roof all day?" the voice asked, sounding a little annoyed. Jane turned her head a little, too apathetic to prop herself up any more then she was already, two flat pillows bunched up under her neck, creating a hard spot of pain in return for slight elevation.

A girl about her age, longish, darkish hair and dark eyes. Hands on hips and a look of impatience. Jane took another long breath in through her cigarette.

"Can I have one?" her new roomate asked. Jane lifted one shoulder in a small shrug.

"I don't know. Can you?" she asked in reply.

"I'll give you..." the new girl furrowed her forehead in thought. "What do you want?"

"Your next chance to get a book from the library."

New girl grinned. "Deal."

Jane gave her a little smile in return and handed a cigarette down, lighting it with the blue bic she kept with her all the time, even when she wasn't carrying any smokes.

"I'm Faith, by the way."

"Jane."

"Yeah, I know. You were all over the papers and TV. You're still in the magazines a lot, y'know."

Jane nodded. "I know. Nobody cares what actually happened, so long as they can make a good story out of what might have."

Faith got the hint and dropped the subject. "Bitch." she said. "You've got the top bunk."

"First come, first served." Jane smiled again, the second time in a few minutes, the second time in a few months.

~~~

 

"So what do you do for fun around here?" Faith asked. It was after lights out, and they were lying in their beds. Staring up. There was nowhere else to look. The guards owned the walls, because they were there to keep the inmates contained. The floor was just a place for things to be attached to, the bunk legs, the walls themselves, a cold, flat surface for walking on and cleaning. But the ceiling, that was Jane's place. When she was looking at it, she could pretend she was somewhere else. In a way, she was.

Faith couldn't see the ceiling. She could see the bottom of Jane's mattress, the coiled lines of springs half-visible through the fabric. Faith resisted the urge to count them. She'd let a few more years go by before she was so bored with life that she counted bedsprings.

"Smoke. Read, sometimes. Wish I was somewhere else. Lot of the girls have torrid affairs, to pass the time."

"Wanna fuck then?"

"No." there was no rejection in Jane's voice, just disinterest.

"Ok."

Time passed, or would have passed if it wasn't just a constant void of darkness and the silence of many people not making any noise.

"I heard you turned yourself in." Jane said.

"Sure did."

"You turned yourself in on murder one? Why?" Her tone of voice was conversational, which sort of jarred her. How different was she now to who she had been before coming in here? Who was this new Jane Burnham who could talk about things like incarceration and murder without raising her voice?

"Exhaustion." Faith said after a pause.

"Really?"

"Honest truth. Swear on my mother's grave."

"Your mother's dead?"

"Yeah."

"I'm sorry. I know how hard it can be to lose a parent." Jane said softly.

"Yeah, but I didn't kill mine."

Jane had heard it too often to feel hurt or angry about it any more. "Neither did I."

"Serious?"

"Honest truth."

That shut Faith up for about two minutes.

"I read in a tabloid that you and what's his name, the guy -"

"Ricky." Jane interrupted.

"Yeah, that's him. I read that you guys are still a thing, like you write to each other all the time and stuff."

"Maybe." she wasn't going to say more then that. But Faith seemed nice, if a little acidic. And Jane hadn't had anybody to talk to for too long. "I don't know if I love him anymore. He's so complacent, he doesn't even care that we're in jail for something we didn't do."

"I don't know, doesn't seem so bad. Regular meals, roof over your head..."

"Yeah, but you turned yourself in." Jane pointed out. "I hate it here. I want to be somewhere else, anywhere. Sometimes I think all day about it, just imagining what I would do if I could just get outside this one fucking room. My bank account is under another name, because my Mom used to make me give her 50% of my money for room and board - "

"Geez, what a bitch." Faith cut in.

"So I'd have money to live on if I got out. Plus, my other name, the one on the bank account. Gemma Stevens. If I could just get out of here, I could go somewhere else, somewhere far, far away and be her."

"If you hate it so much, why don't you break out?"

Jane laughed. It wasn't intended to be a nice sound, rather sardonic and bitter and world-weary. Didn't quite come out that way, though, rather light and genuinely amused. Faith had sounded so serious, making such an obviously silly suggestion.

"You crack me up, Faith." Jane leant over the edge of the bunk and handed Faith a cigarette. "Here."

"What's this for?"

"Making me laugh. Even trade." Jane lit both cigarettes. "Here's to the start of a beautiful friendship."

They smoked in the darkness, staring up at nothing and everything.

~~~

"Wakey wakey." the morning was cold, and had a headache.

"Mphfm fuck off." Jane mumbled. Faith poked her again.

"Get the lead out, girl. Breakfast's in an hour and a half."

"You cannot possibly be functioning this early in the morning."

"I don't sleep much. C'mon, get up."

Jane threw a pillow at Faith, then realised she now had nothing to support her head. She sat up with more annoyed muttering.

"You're crazy."

"So I've been told. Do we get coffee?"

"Yeah, but it's instant shit. Tastes like dirt." Jane blinked, trying to wake up fully.

"Hey, I'll drink dirt if it has caffiene."

Yawning widely, Jane stretched her arms up until her hands hit the ceiling, clicking the joints. Faith looked her up and down appraisingly.

"You've got some premium curves there."

"Gee, thanks." Jane said, climbing down off her bunk. "This is the perfect stage in my life for that."

"Can I have a cigarette?"

"You gotta tell me a story first."

"What, like Hansel and Gretel or something?" Faith asked, her eyebrows raised.

"No. Ever played 'anywhere but here'?"

"No."

"Well," Jane explained. "You make up a story. One that starts something like 'we're at the airport, about to catch a flight to Spain...'"

"I'll give it a shot." Faith said, sitting down on her bed and looking up at her cellmate while she thought. "We're in a hospital. Other people do everything, all we have to do is lie there. Have to lie there, actually, because we're in comas..." her gaze was fixed on middle distance.

"I don't think you really understand this concept."

Faith's expression changed from dreamy detachment to bewildered incomprehension. Jane handed her the cigarette anyway. "Look, I'll do one so you get the idea. Think of a band... come on, you've got to help me with this."

"Nirvana?" Faith hazarded. Jane smiled and nodded. "Great! Ok, we're at a Nirvana concert in the front row. During one song, Kurt stage dives into the crowd, and when he's climbing back onstage, he beckons to us. We watch the rest of the show from next to the drumkit." she lit her own cigarette as she finished.

Faith looked very skeptical. "But Kurt Cobain's dead." she pointed out.

"Doesn't matter. We're not at a concert anyway, so why can't it be Nirvana?"

"People say I'm crazy. Should introduce them to you." Faith shook her head with a slightly dazed smile.

"Now you try one." Jane ordered.

"All right. Nightclub, middle of the night. Full of cheap booze, we're dancing. Music's loud, our blood's pumping in time. Lights flashing so fast it's a little confusing."

Jane handed Faith a second cigarette

"And you say you've never played."

~~~

Laundry duty. Steam hissing and heat closing in, increasing the claustrophobia already threatening to send them insane.

"Good for the pores." Faith pointed out, hefting another pile of dripping wet bedding easily and moving it over to the carts. Jane couldn't believe how much Faith could carry, she was the same age as Jane herself, and they both smoked enough for fitness to be equally bad between them. But Faith was very fit, very strong, and very limber. Jane had traded off numerous cigarettes over the last week and a half in exchange for Faith teaching her to do tae kwon do moves.

Faith had her own supply but they were both so compulsive with the habit that one or the other ran out almost every day. So they traded martial arts techniques, turns at listening to the other's music, secrets. Faith was best at the last one, Jane would hand over half her stash as she listened, rapt, to stories of vampires and demons and body switching. It all sounded completely unlikely, but Jane knew that just because nobody would believe it didn't stop a thing from being true.

They talked about imaginary things a lot, playing 'anywhere but here' all through the night. Jane had never played it before her time in jail, but had gotten very good at it fast. Faith, on the other hand, had developed her skill through years of experience. She'd just never known the name of the game keeping her alive. For every anywhere, the teller would be paid a cigarette by the listener. It wasn't always because of necessity, it just seemed the thing to do. A ritual to create familiarity in a terrifyingly unfamiliar environment.

When they got back from laundry, Jane felt exhausted and depressed. They didn't usually play their games during the day, it was something for when there was no light, no chance to learn things from each other or do their own thing, but Jane needed it right now. She got out her pack of Virginia Slims and passed one to Faith.

"Hmm... where do you want to go today?" Faith lit up and sat next to Jane on the top bunk.

"Somewhere with cool water." Jane mopped the sweat off her brow. "The laundry is a stinking sweatbath."

"'Kay." Faith thought for a minute and began to speak.

"We're at a waterslide park. The air is hot but the water is clear and deliciously icy on our skin. I'm going on all the best slides, big loopy ones and long fast ones, but you're paddling in the surf pool, letting the water lap against your sides as you float, staring up at the clouds. That's why it's so boiling hot, there's rain coming. I get bored and come and find you, by now you're under the water. Your hair fans out around you like another cloud. I tell you you're chicken for not doing the waterslides, and dare you to go down headfirst. You do it, just to prove me wrong. Half an hour before the park closes for the night we get throws out for pouring jumbo-sized cups of red soda into the kiddie pool. We sneak back in when everyone's gone home and fool around in the pools all night."

Jane had her eyes closed as she listened. As Faith finished speaking, she exhaled, blowing blue-grey smoke out like the clouds in the daydream.

"Your turn." Faith offered a token cigarette as payment.

"Fine." Jane tried to make it sound like a chore, but it didn't really work.

"We live in a big, old, sandstone house, and work in a music store. The manager's really easygoing, so we spend most of the time listening to the CDs ourselves."

"Pathetic. That was not worth a whole cigarette." Faith gave Jane a withering look.

"Hey, fuck you, I'm exhausted. Ok... we're working in the music store and a fire breaks out, trapping us. Two firemen come and rescue us, and fall madly in lust. We live in luxury for the rest of our lives."

"I don't think firemen make that much money, to keep us in luxury." Faith pointed out.

"They're not really firemen, they're millionaires pretending to be firemen so we don't fall in love with them for their money."

"Just for their big hoses, eh?" Faith asked, deadpan. They both started laughing.

~~~

"We're waiting in the queue at a movie theatre - "

"What's showing?"

"Umm... The Shawshank Redemption." Jane said with an evil smirk.

"Enh, wrong answer." Faith protested. They were doing stretches, there was just enough floorspace for them both to work their muscles at once. Jane was huffing from the strain of it, she didn't have the stamina to keep up with her friend.

Faith was an enigma to her. The young woman never slept if she could help it, dismissing Jane's observation of this with flippant comments. Her strength, physically at least, seemed without match. Mentally, she wasn't a see-saw so much as a merry-go-round, whirling and making you dizzy until you wondered if the ride ever slowed down just a little. Crazy and beautiful.

"Come on, you want that cigarette you gotta earn it." Faith encouraged, flipping onto her hands and balancing as easily as she did on her feet.

"Well if you don't like my story how am I supposed to earn it?" Jane was actually in need of the payment this particular time. She'd traded her whole packet to Faith in exchange for a detailed account of how to live with no money and a warrant out for your arrest. Jane was hoping she'd eventually need this knowledge.

Faith flipped again so she was once again standing before Jane. They'd both stopped excercising, although Jane's breath was still a little short from the workout.

"A kiss." Faith said, pushing her hair out of her eyes.

Jane stepped back. "I told you, I don't - "

"If you want that cigarette." Faith said in a low voice, stepping forward as Jane stepped back. "You gotta give me a kiss."

Jane was silent. Her thought process was something along the lines of 'this is exactly what I need in my life right now. Fantastic. Spectacular. I fall in love with a girl while wrongly imprisoned for murder. Exactly like I wrote on my career aspirations form at school.'

"C'mon, J." Faith said with a note of pleading in the words. "I don't get to fight anybody in here, there's no room for me to even work out properly unless I go in the yard, and it's just depressing out there. No dancing, no decent food... I gotta get laid or I'll pop. You don't want burst Faith all over the walls, do ya?"

"How did we go from a kiss to getting laid? Ok, fine. I know there's no way for me to win this, so just - "

And then they were kissing.

Faith's mind was far more disjointed then Jane's, and she didn't always think in words anyway. If she had been thinking in words at that moment, though, the words would have been 'She's so soft. I'm gonna bruise her if I hold her too tight. Not like me, I'm hard. Couldn't bruise me with a nail gun. So much like me though - smooth and soft, nothing like me really – so much like me Oh My God does she know how fucking sexy she is whimper for me again J, just like that. Trusts me so much, poor thing doesn't know any better. So much power over her, always loved that rush. She knows she's got power over me, loving it aren't you? So much like me after all but I never let myself be this soft always gotta be thorny keep them at arms length but Jane, Jane, Jane, so close, much closer then arms length and I bet this is love and that would just be fucking typical, wouldn't it?'

Nobody slept on the top bunk that night.

~~~

"We're extras in a movie, and the director notices us..."

"The bus we're riding on breaks down, right in front of a haunted mansion..."

"We're walking down the street, and we run into Jonathan Davis and Jay Gordon..."

"We're on a cruise ship..."

~~~

Faith was blossoming. Sometimes she was in danger of having one of the other inmates take a swing at her, because she was happy all the time. Not that it would have bothered her very much if somebody had tried to hurt her. She didn't pick fights, but she'd relish the chance to defend herself.

Jane, though, was wilting. She'd been losing her spirit already when she'd first met Faith, and although their games and occasional rolls on the matress kept her sane, they weren't nearly enough.

Punching at the walls, her bedding, fists pounding down on her thighs.

"I can't stay here. I don't belong here!" Jane tried to shout, but Faith held her as she twisted and attempted to scream, one hand clamped firmly over Jane's mouth. Jane bit at Faith's palm but the hand didn't move until Jane stopped struggling and let herself go limp. All the fight gone out of her.

"I'm losing my mind." Jane said softly. Faith just held her, rocking gently. After a moment of unhappy silence Faith began to speak quietly, a kind of fatalistic resolve in her voice.

"We're at the funfair. The kind that's just perfect, a day that has no bad moments from start to finish. We ride the rollercoaster and the merry-go-round and get lost in the hall of mirrors. I eat too much cotton candy and get my face all sticky. You win at ring toss and they give you a beautiful china doll, you name it Annie. We give it to a little girl who's crying because the clowns scared her. When the sun goes down, there are fireworks that light up the sky and make us gasp even though we're way too old to think stuff like that is neat."

Faith looked down at Jane's face. The girl's eyes were closed, not in relaxation but scrunched up, hiding as far away from reality as she could. When Faith finished speaking, Jane opened her eyes.

"No more."

"Huh?"

"I don't want to hear any more." Jane stood up, rubbing her flushed cheeks. "They just... I don't know."

"They hurt?" Faith asked. Jane nodded, looking over. Neither of them had ever noticed before how haunted the other's eyes were. Two fragile women, just out of childhood, with more knowledge of the world between them then anyone they'd ever met.

Later, while Jane slept, curled up in Faith's arms, Faith looked down at her, their dark hair driting together, almost the same shade. She knew what she had to do.

~~~

"I hate it out here." Jane scowled at the colorless landscape of concrete, wire, and other young women with broken spirits and dreamless eyes. "You hate it out here. Why are we out here?"

She began to scratch in the dirt. Faith watched her, occasionally looking up to take stock of the surrounds. She had to find the perfect moment. Jane drew a face, with squiggles of long hair coming off the scalp. No features though. No eyes, no mouth. Faith thought it was a pretty disturbing image.

"That you or me?" Faith asked, nodding her head at the featureless girl. Jane shrugged listlessly.

"No real difference, is there?"

That was it. Faith couldn't stand to see her like this anymore.

There were three heavy wire fences, topped with barbed curls of metal. Three silvery webs between them and freedom. Faith's hands shook a little as she looked around again and then put her hands on the innermost barrier.

Nobody was paying any attention to them. Nobody ever did, even if they were puportedly two of the most vicious inmates of the prison's history. They just sat quietly all the time, talking and not causing trouble. No reason to waste time watching them when there were so many troublemakers.

The wire bent like pipe cleaners, malleable and soft under Faith's diamond-hard fingers. Jane stood stock still, agape.

"I knew you were strong..." she managed to say finally.

Faith ducked through the gap she made and started on the second fence. Jane looked around nervously, just as Faith had, to make sure nobody was watching.

As she got to the third one, Faith's natural impaitience kicked in and she simply brought her foot up against the wire with such force the metal bent up and tore out of the ground, leaving a large hole to crawl through. It had all taken a few seconds, from start to finish.

"Get gone." Faith ordered Jane.

"You're not coming with me?"

"Here voluntarily, remember?"

Jane looked at Faith, then at her ticket to freedom. Faith could feel the pull of the outside world too, but it scared her. She couldn't function out there in the confusion and the evil. It would swallow her whole again. She belonged here, on the inside.

But Jane didn't. She hadn't done anything wrong.

Jane was painfully conscious of her window of opportunity closing fast. She gave Faith a hug that was tight and gentle, so gentle Faith felt that maybe Jane was capable of bruising her after all.

"Hey, don't worry, we're gonna meet again." Faith managed to say.

Jane nodded, understanding.

"I'll see you there, then."

Jane Burnham vanished, as Gemma Stevens ran for her chance at a life.

~~~

Faith lay on the top bunk, because there was nobody else to sleep there now and it was hers, all hers. One leg dangled off the edge, swinging in the air. She looked at the ceiling and smoked.

Her eyes had a bit of a sting to them, but she didn't cry.

 


End file.
